In Praise of Cher’s Response to the Flint Water Crisis

Oh, Cher. If I thought I loved you when you said, “If I want to put my tits on my back, it’s nobody’s business but my own,” or when you declared, “If you’re black in this country, if you’re a woman in this country, if you are any minority in this country at all, what could possibly possess you to vote Republican?” that is nothing compared with how I feel about you today.

It was “from Rachel,” the singer-actor–Oscar winner said, that she first heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. And Cher, we have so much in common! Because on cozy winter nights, I am glued to Rachel, too!

The situation in Flint is so horrendous, so infuriating, that when Hillary Clinton was asked about what subject she was sorry hadn’t been covered in last Sunday’s debate, she replied, “I think every single American should be outraged . . . We had a city in the United States of America where the population, which is poor in many ways and majority African-American, has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water. And the governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care. He had a request for help that he basically stonewalled. I’ll tell you what: If the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would have been action.”

And yes, so many of us were outraged, too, but what did we do about it besides kicking the television? Not a whole lot. But Cher made a deal to donate with Icelandic Glacial, and now more than 180,000 bottles of water are on their way to Michigan.

Perhaps her extraordinary gesture can be at least partially explained by her confession that she is “scared to death of being poor. It’s like a fat girl who loses 500 pounds but is always fat inside. I grew up poor and will always feel poor inside. It’s my pet paranoia.”

But plenty of other celebrities grew up broke, and do you see them tweeting: “WTF IS GOING ON W/POWER MAD, GREED DRIVEN, KILLER, INCOMPETENT, POLITICIANS? THEY R CRIMINALS!! . . .”?

Cher, after all the decades we have spent together, you still rock my world.